Damian Beresford

This months Waterford Open Coffee meeting has the air of a school tour about it – we’re meeting in Dunhill in the heart of rural Waterford this Friday, more details here.

Given that I grew up only a few miles from Dunhill (in neighbouring Annestown, famous for being the only village in Ireland without a pub! Although given the way every second pub these days is up for sale, this may not be the case for too much longer unfortunately), I’m really looking forward to getting a tour of the Enterprise Park and hearing about the plans in motion for phase 3 of its development (I’ve been to the center for a few very enjoyable and enlightening evening lectures in the past few months given by renowned local historian Julian Walton, but I’ve never seen the place in day light).

The DBFA community (Dunhill, Fenor, Boatstrand, Annestown) really have done an incredible job over the last 15 years or more in developing the local area, and its a real credit to everyone involved (even earning a national award back in 2005). The Enterprise Center and the Copper Coast initiative are probably the biggest projects, but as you can see from the websites, there’s a lot going on there – fair play to Donal and team!

Here are some pictures on flickr of the area: Dunhill Castle, Annestown, Boatstrand, Bunmahon, Copper Coast, Stradbally.

Also, for anyone who’s curious about the Waterford Open Coffee club and is a bit hesitant to come along as you may not know anybody, get in touch with me beforehand (dberesford@gmail.com), I’ll answer any questions you may have and keep an eye out for you on the day (I know I personally hate walking into a room not knowing anyone!).

Blogging has been light of late, mainly due to being immersed in writing our own min-CRM tool for Tax123.ie (why write your own CRM in this day and age I hear you ask? For very good reasons, mainly to do with achieving 100% integration with our internal processes (and also a significant long term cost reduction) – I’ll blog about this some more at some point in the future. Anyhow, a core feature of our mini-CRM is complete integration with our email (hosted by Google Apps, which I have nothing but praise for also), so that any emails to customers can be kept in sync regardless of where they’re sent from (i.e. GMail or our mini-CRM).

Thankfully timing wise, Google Mail added IMAP support back in October. Also thankfully, IMAP does exactly what it says on the tin – I love it with API’s just work! (Although there were a few hairy bits ensuring that everything is UTF-8, the Polish charset is ISO-8859-2 and was causing a few problems before I got the encoding right). So, we’re away on a hack with our mini-CRM, roll on tax processing nirvana!

Also, just read the Ecomonists interesting take on social networks and the AOL/Bebo acquisition – some good points in there, but to me however, it is a business – its all about the brand! I’m not saying it’s justifies a $850 million price tag, but Bebo is a household brand name (in Ireland and the UK anyhow) and it very much keeps AOL in the game. Coupled with AOL’s other less news worthy acquisitions and that somebody, somewhere, in AOL has a plan – good luck to them, it will be interesting to watch!

Had a great day at Creative Camp on Saturday – great to meet so many interesting people. Thanks to those who attended my talk on Outsourcing (and special thanks to Qamir and Gabriela for their insightful contributions to the discussion afterwards). All the sessions I attended were very good, excellent in fact. I’m particularly interested in what may come out of Bernie‘s session on ‘Beyond open coffee’ – there were some excellent ideas and contributions from the room and it was great to see that Open Coffee and other similar networking events are thriving in other counties.

Big thanks to Keith, Ken and Tom for a flawlessly organised event and also to all the sponsors involved – looking forward to the next one!

Update: Gariela has detailed notes on the sessions she attended at Creative Camp here – thanks Gabriela!

I gave a talk on outsourcing this morning at the Waterford Open Coffee Club. Flew through the slides in about 5 minutes, but the resulting Q&A discussion was very good. Will have to remember to slow down a bit at Creative Camp tomorrow!

Presentation available here, any questions please get in touch (dberesford@gmail.com).